Gender Gap Narrows

(Reuters) – General Motors Co said on Tuesday Chief Executive Officer Dan Akerson will step down next month and be replaced by global product development chief Mary Barra, who will become the first woman to lead a global automaker.

Though I might buy the argument that at the CEO level – typically older managers – the full effect hasn’t hit yet.

That right there, without anything more, is enough to show a gender gap. You may still argue that it’s a gender gap that is correcting and doesn’t need any pushing, but you can’t say that on one hand there’s no gender gap and on the other hand admit that there’s a gender gap for C-levels.

Meanwhile, 23 out of 500 and 9 out of 100 scarcely looks like gender equality.

“Meanwhile, 23 out of 500 and 9 out of 100 scarcely looks like gender equality.”

That statement neglects the element of choice, similar to “why don’t we see more women on the front lines in combat?” Maybe they in fact don’t want to be there! A more appropriate study would be how many women submitted their names for a board seat or a C-level position but were never hired. How do you know that it wasn’t only 23 out of 500 who applied? Maybe the ratio of guys who want CEO jobs vs. women who want them is actually 500:23 and similar to front-line combat jobs in the military. We should artificially inflate that to 50/50 just for the optics and “feel good” of it? Ridiculous.

Blatant gender discrimination is wrong, but outside of that people still have to realize that workplaces aren’t playgrounds, they’re competitive environments where it’s dog-eat-dog at the end of the day. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, the early bird gets the worm, – pick your cliche – but a company isn’t candyland or some political petri-dish.

People also have to realize that a CEO job in a major corporation is a super-stressful one. It’s a hair-greying, free-time-eliminating, and marriage- and family-straining or even ruining experience that quite frankly, not a lot of women want. For that matter, not a lot of family-focused men want it, either. It’s not that they don’t want the title – everyone would for a day – it’s that they don’t want the stress and the work that inherently comes with it.

In large, public companies it’s not family and company and making both work, it’s family OR company and trying to keep one alive while you’re focused on the other.

That said, that men think they can just “leave the kids with the wife and nanny” and put in those 80hrs a week speaks to sexism in itself, but as for gender gaps, I’m with Pino. I think the issue, thanks largely to the women’s movement, has in fact almost entirely been put to bed.

Let’s also keep in mind that a majority of the HR profession – i.e. the people responsible for hiring and screening – are women. Are people here suggesting that these women turn on their own?

Don’t forget the fact that men and women are just different. It’s obviously why the orcs at the core must accept human neurological uniformity as religious dogma (they’d get kick of the club!), but anyone remotely concerned about reality can dismiss this out of hand. The right-hand tail of the bell curve is exactly where you’d expect to see the differences, ergo more male CEOs.

Hi Thales, I agree. I don’t believe this gives misogyny or bigotry a free pass (and am not saying that’s what you’re saying) but I do believe that the PC Police have done too much of a job in trying to whitewash our differences, trying to make “different” appear as “inferior” when it isn’t.

The point being that by the time we have anything approximating “equality” in CEO positions, it’ll be the surest sign that real power has fled elsewhere, just as Congress once *was* that “smoky backroom” where deals were made and has now be relegated to entertainment circus while actual decisions are made elsewhere.